Tuesday, September 20, 2016

In the past several years, few books have amazed me as much as Daniel
Gardner’s The Science of Fear. Using scientific studies Gardner examines
in detail how fear works in the human psyche and then gets misapplied in
our lives.

His first best example is fear of flying after
9/11. Americans avoided flying in the year after the terrorists attacks, driving
rather than flying whenever they could. Yet, flying is far safer than driving.
A study compared flying and driving statistics and found increased traffic
deaths in 2002. It estimated that 1,595 people needlessly died on America’s
roads because they drove rather than flew in the year after 9/11.

Why do we make such bad choices about danger?

When an airliner crashes, our gut reacts and the
event is seared in our memory. But when traffic deaths mount in a slow dribble
– 1 at the edge of town, 3 a hundred miles away, and so on, we hardly notice.
Yet, at the end of the year, for every 10,000 people who flew vs. those who
drove, more will die in their cars than in a plane crash.

How about silicon breast implants? They can leak
and make women sick, right? We all know it's true. Yet, Gardner goes
looking for proof and finds not one single medical study has been able to
prove it. Never mind. There were endless emotional news stories of women, with tears in their eyes and agony in their
faces relating how a ruptured implant led to connective tissue disorder. It
must be true, right? Lawyers saw an opportunity and filed lawsuits. As
newspaper, television and magazine stories of ruptured implants mounted, public perception was universal; they’re dangerous! Manufacturers were
forced to establish a $4.25 billion fund to settle suits ($1billion went to
attorneys).

Gardner’s conclusion: “Humans are good with stories
and bad with numbers.”

What numbers got lost in all the emotional stories
of suffering women? The rate of connective tissue disorder in women who’ve
never had implants is exactly the same as it is in those who did. That’s why
the FDA has once again approved silicon implants.

Gardner explains how dramatic, emotional media
stories create a recognizable narrative. When future stories create the
impression of a trend, they’re reported no matter how meaningless the related
story might be, giving us an impression of a trend much bigger than it is.
After Timothy McVey blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the media
dramatically increased their coverage of militia groups filled with angry white
men with guns, no matter how unimportant the story or minimal the threat. It
was part of the ongoing narrative. 9/11 broke that narrative and replaced angry
white men with militant Muslims. Now actual terrorism committed by angry white
men gets far less media attention than simple charges or suspicions of Muslim
extremists.

According to a report in Newsweek Magazine in
February of this year, American right wing militia groups have killed more people since
2002 than Muslim extremists. But it seems no one is aware. Donald Trump isn't insisting that white militia members be profiled for examination by authorities, he's calling for profiling Muslims.

It get's crazier. When I do searches of gun deaths caused by toddlers with guns (toddlers who found a loaded gun in their home and shot someone) I find that toddlers killed and maimed more Americans in the past year than terrorists did. Shall we start profiling toddlers?

Needless fear also gets stoked when danger is
presented without context. Fears of both
child abduction and West Nile virus are great examples of dangers presented
without context.

And 18 was the grand total of deaths from the virus
in all of 2002. They didn’t offer any context, such as 875 Americans die in a
typical year choking on food – that’s over 48 times the threat of West Nile.

Where’s our daily choking report?

Still, a 2002 Pew survey found that 70% of American
were closely following the West Nile story even though the chances of getting
it were tiny, chances of suffering symptoms were rarer still, and the chances
of dying from it were statistically miniscule. Only 7% more (77%) followed the
build-up to war with Iraq.

Fear sells.

In 2012, we panicked all over again, but this time
it was Ebola. That turned out to be yet another screaming headline without much of a story. Only time will tell if Zika will be a real threat, or another pointless panic.

Few things scare a parent more than the threat of
child abduction. We have Amber alerts, Anderson Cooper specials about bizarre
abductions, we fingerprint children and train them in self-defense. Yet, the
odds of a child being abducted by a stranger and never returned are freakishly
rare.

Gardner documents routine claims by law enforcement
officials, child advocacy groups, and the media claiming “50,000- 75,000
children are stolen from their parent’s arms each year.” He goes looking for
the original source of these numbers and can’t find it. The phantom numbers
were caught in a feedback loop. One group used them, another group sited the
first group’s use of the numbers, and on and on until newspapers and TV anchors
are reporting, “Child advocacy groups claim that 50,000-75,000 . . .”

Gardner instead found a 1999 study that finally
laid out the actual numbers. That year 797,500 people under the age of 18 were
reported missing. If you take that number, subtract the runaways and the family
abductions (one parent or other family member taking a child in a custody
dispute), and then subtract the 18 year old boyfriends who drove their 16 year
old girlfriends across state lines, and concentrate on just stereotypical
kidnappings of children under the age of 14, you’re left with only 90 cases.
Not 50,000 nor 75,000, but 90!

But then the personal stories of those 90
kidnappings get reported over and over along with the unfounded numbers,
“50,000-70,000” thrown in for effect. Without the context we’re left thinking
our children are in terrible, relentless danger. What are the real odds your
child will be kidnapped? One in 608,696. But an American child is 2.5 times
more likely to drown in a swimming pool and 26 times more likely to die in a
car crash.

So why is there so much fear and why do we spend so much
energy fearing the wrong things while ignoring real dangers? Gardner states it
pretty well; “We are safer and healthier than ever and yet we are more
worried about injury, disease, and death than ever. Why? In part, it’s because
there are few opportunities to make money from convincing people they are, in
fact, safer and healthier than ever – but there are huge profits to be made
promoting fear.”

“A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Thursday, September 8, 2016

There’s a breeze blowing through our culture. A yearning to
live a more authentic life. A search for something less contrived, less
advertised. If it’s corporate or branded or the choice of the elite, well, it’s
a little suspect, or maybe even an automatic joke. Not everybody sees it this
way, but the breeze is blowing.

It's all craft beer in the Contrarian's beer fridge, leftovers from a recent din-

ner party. Not one single guest brought a corporate brew.

The craft beer world provides a thumbnail sketch of this movement.
At some point in the ‘80s, restless American beer drinkers flocked to the broad
varieties, quality and flavor of European beers. Once you’ve fallen in love
with a full-bodied stout from the British Isles or a Belgian wheat, comic
commercials filled with aging sports stars and girls in bikinis trying to
convince you that Bud Lite is better than Miller Lite look embarrassingly lame.
A small craft beer industry began brewing interesting, complex beers and grew until now
virtually every corner of America has a taproom serving local brews. The
folks drinking there are openly hostile to whatever bill of goods the corporate
breweries are peddling.

Go to one of the great Americana music festivals around the
US and you’ll find these kinds of people drinking their IPAs and listening to music that doesn’t get
played on the radio–wasn’t approved by somebody at the record company’s
corporate headquarters. In recent years I’ve attended many, many big, sold out shows for
acts that rarely or never get played on the radio. And much of what the radio plays, this crowd avoids.

The breeze is blowing through the food industry, too. We’re
increasingly seeing small organic farms, small cheese and meat
producers, people tending bees for honey in their backyards and planting
gardens and canning their homegrown produce. There are people in my life who
refuse to go to fast food restaurants and roll their eyes at the highway’s
usual suspects – Applebee’s, Outback Steakhouse, and Chile’s - places derisively called, “McSitdown Restaurants.” Instead, they're looking for the
oddball food truck or the little restaurant with local flavor owned by a mom
& pop. Farm-to-table, vegetarianism, anti-GMOs, free range, organic, veganism; it goes on and on.

Home grown and canned peppers sit beside organic products in the

Contrarian's frig.

Peek around any corner and you’ll find folks recoiling from the technologically filtered and yearning to be
closer to the source. My three 20-something sons all have turntables and buy
albums, not CDs or MP3s. They claim it has a warmer sound. In fact, last year more albums were sold than CDs in
the US.

I know young gals in their 20s who are knitting and others friends
making their own musical instruments. If it can be made rather than bought, there's a growing movement to do just that.

I feel the breeze in my real estate business. A decade ago
people were mortgaging themselves through the eyeballs to buy mega-square footage
McMansions with vinyl siding and plastic baseboard, cheap cabinets and
builder-grade carpet that was worn out in a couple years. Today, more buyers
have saved a bigger down payment and they're buying smaller houses with higher quality
finishes. It's less financially precarious and less superficial.

There hasn’t been a mass rejection of mainstream culture
like this since that 1960s. And to a great degree I’m fine with that. It
diversifies our economy and puts regular folks in greater control of their own
world. But it’s not always a gentle, sweet breeze. Sometimes it’s an ill wind.

This breeze of doubt and suspicion also blew the anti-vaccine movement
into our culture–the belief that those vaccines that have eradicated diseases
worldwide and saved tens of millions of lives were more danger than cure. If fifty
scientific studies can be ignored because just one said vaccines were dangerous,
you’re supporting an outsider view to the point it could kill your children. And so, we’re seeing once eradicated diseases reappearing in the
wealthiest nations on earth.

And this breeze blew Bernie Sanders to near the top of the
Democrat ticket and Donald Trump to the top of the GOP, and thanks to Brexit it’s
blowing England out of the EU. People are doubting old tried and true answers. It’s here in medicine and politics that I get nervous about this search
behind the billboards and beneath the well-paved way of doing things. Just
because you’re tired of the insider elite doesn’t mean the outsider is better. The
outsider might be lying to you. The outsider might be more fake and corrupt than the well-paid corporate insider.

Because we were so fed up with "business as usual," the U.S. Senate and
House of Representatives are now almost completely void of statesmen. We've replaced pragmatic statesmen with angry, insurgent outsiders who don’t have the education,
temperament, or the clue needed to strike a deal. Democracy is utterly dependent upon making a compromise–accepting that you won’t get everything you
want and neither will your opponent.

Deciding emotionally is the danger. Once you’ve done that,
reason is out the door and you’re either ignoring one thing or pointing at
another to justify your choice. Maybe the key is stepping away from the
corporate and insider elite with an open heart rather and an angry resolve.
Open hearts make for clear minds. Angry resolves lead to quick, cloudy judgments.

“A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Thursday, September 1, 2016

It was 1994. I was restoring a Victorian era home
in a growing community. Our family of five was pinching pennies on my meager
teacher’s salary so I took to dumpster diving at old house construction sites
and salvaging historic architectural elements at homes slated for demolition,
reselling them to antique dealers. And leaving for school each morning I passed
striking Firestone workers at the edge of my neighborhood.

That confluence of experiences laid the foundation
for my novel; The Salvage Man. It’s the story of Dan Reynolds, a man who’s
become invisible in a place where he thought he’d matter. In a startling moment
of terror and wonder, he meets another soul as invisible as he is. Together,
they seek redemption.

In the early morning dark, driving to work, I found
myself behind a slow moving truck pulling a magnet that hung an inch above the
street, gathering nails dumped by union workers to harass scabs. My town’s
biggest employer, Firestone, was trying to break the union. The union-busting,
picket-line crossing, slow-motion destruction of those jobs happened a few blocks
from my home. The plight of those workers weighed on my mind. Their jobs were
being sent abroad. The world was passing them by.

When I moved to this town in the late ‘80s, the
population was 18,000 and growing. Many of those Firestone workers were raised
here. I met blue-collar folks my age who grew up in a town they thought would
be 10-15,000 people, where they’d have jobs of a certain kind and fit in
socially in the life of the town. But even in the late ‘80s it was changing
rapidly, and by the mid ‘90s, that world was evaporating. Today, our population
is 55,000.

That growth and those new suburban residents
created an economic vitality that overshadowed the fading blue-collar colors of
the town. For the writer in me, that became Dan Reynolds’ background.

During the same period my little family lived in an
1890s house I was restoring. I took to dumpster diving for old
house parts at demolition sites and stripping old houses prior to demolition.
It helped me restore my home and provided extra cash as I sold truckloads to
antique salvage yards.

Once, my neighbor Russ and I salvage cut stone
steps from a neglected farmstead west of town. It was being demolished to make
way for a new subdivision. The 1870s Italianate home was partially
collapsed, leaning like a Dr. Seuss cartoon house. Russ had been inside already
looking for salvage. Digging out the four-foot long stones that hot sunny day,
I asked if there was anything inside worth taking. Russ is not prone to
mysticism, but he gravely said, “Something bad happened in there. You can feel
it. Don’t go in.” The cold insistence in his eyes convinced me. We muscled the
stone steps into my pickup and left.

The setting for The Salvage Man

And The Salvage Man story percolated and evolved in
my mind.

A few years later I salvaged again at a picturesque
farmstead at the north end of town, across from the last covered bridge in the
county. In my new position as a Realtor and the president of the local
preservation group, I’d convinced the developer to save the pre-Civil War home.
But the barn, grain bin, milk house and carriage house were all being
demolished to make way for yet another new subdivision. I felt a deep sadness as I
gathered doors, porch posts and shutters that had been discarded in the barn
loft. The next week when I went back for more salvage, I found a staggering
mountain of dirt had been moved, making a twenty foot deep dry mote around the
barn, which was now perched on an island. It was a bizarre scene. Eventually the barn
would be demolished and the ground beneath it also moved to make the
subdivision’s retention pond.

It was there on that farmstead that I set the story
of the Salvage Man, there that I imagined Dan Reynolds doing the same work I
was doing, but he did it to financially survive after the strike. And like the
old farmhouse Russ had entered, this one gave off an ominous feeling inside; dense,
stale air, and dark rooms that put a tingle at the back of your neck and filled
your chest with an adrenaline-spiked urge to get the hell out.

It is there inside that house, in that barn, and on
that land that Dan Reynold’s life changes.

I imagined Dan not only challenged by the end of
his factory job, but divorced at age 50, his kids grown and gone. All the
things that once defined this silent, emotionless man–job, marriage,
parenthood–are all gone. And his hometown is increasingly unrecognizable. To
make him feel even shittier, the lone way he finds to survive is to “undress,”
as Dan puts it, the town’s historic identity, to be sold off at antique stores
before the rest is sent to a landfill.

But there in that house, in that barn, and on that
land, Dan Reynolds finds redemption.

“A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Followers

About Me

The Contrarian's work has appeared in the Noblesville Daily Ledger, The Noblesville Times, NUVO Newsweekly, The Indianapolis Eye (web-based), The Noblesville Current, and at www.dailyyonder.com. He is the co-founder of the literary journal, the Polk Street Review, where his stories also appear. His novel, Stardust was published in 2002 and has just been republished again under the title "Noblesville," by River's Edge Media. His 2nd novel, The Salvage Man, was released August of 2015 by River's Edge. Kurt is a former school teacher and a Realtor.